According to standards of care in the healthcare industry, certain medical articles are to be placed in use for no more than a designated usage period. For example, indwelling catheters are supposed to be removed and replaced periodically to avoid infection. The Foley urinary catheter, for example, is supposed to be replaced a designated number of days after placement. Other types of medical articles, such as breathing tubes, feeding bags and blood transfusion filters, have other designated usage periods.
The failure to replace a medical article when its usage period expires, poses significant health risks for the patient. Specifically, this failure can cause hospital-acquired infections (HAIs). In the case of urinary applications, this failure can cause urinary tract infection (UTI) or catheter-associated urinary tract infection (CAUTI). UTI is the single most common HAI, and the majority of cases of hospital-acquired UTI are associated with an indwelling urinary catheter. The consequences of these infections can include prolonged illness, the onset of new medical conditions, injury or death.
Attempts have been made to properly manage the usage periods of deployed medical articles. For example, clinicians are known to attach tags to medical articles and write dates and times on the tags. Other known attempts involve timers that are attachable to medical articles.
These attempts, however, have several shortcomings. Hospitals can be high-paced environments, especially in the areas relating to surgery, including the pre-operative, perioperative and post-operative phases. It can be burdensome to require clinicians to physically write times on tags. Also, hand writing can be illegible, leading to inaccurate time tracking information.
Furthermore, use of the known tag and timer can be relatively complex. For example, the use of the known tag and timer requires several implementation steps. The clinician must attach the tag or timer to the medical article. Then, the clinician must manually write the time on the tag. When every second is a precious commodity in high-paced medical environments, the burden of these tasks can have a significant disadvantage, requiring too much time to implement the tag or timer.
In addition, the time pressures on clinicians can lead some of them to intentionally tamper with the known tag or timer. For example, to avoid the time necessary to replace a medical article, a clinician might wrongfully mark-out or change the time information written on the known tag to make it appear as if the usage period has not expired. Likewise, when the timer of a medical article shows an expired usage period, a busy clinician might wrongfully keep the medical article in use while replacing its timer with a new timer. The new timer would falsely indicate an unexpired usage period for the medical article. This type of tampering or wrongdoing can lead to the health risks and infections described above. The tamper vulnerability and complexities of the known tag and timer can frustrate the adoption and implementation of time-tracking practices by the medical community.
The foregoing background describes some, but not necessarily all, of the problems, disadvantages and shortcomings related to the known management of usage periods of medical articles.